If ever there was a place where the dead should rise up in anger and vengeance (or at least annoyance), it's here. The Strickland and Peek Cemetery was tiny, but it was in this spot long before the Hawthorne Plaza Shopping Center, which was literally built around it.
The graveyard is now wedged into a gravel-and-weed strewn alley cut into the stores on the loading dock side of the shopping center. A locked gate and metal fence keeps mall rats away -- if they ever wander back here -- but being surrounded on three sides by 20-foot-high walls is not the peaceful eternal vista that these dead imagined.
